Bridge Foundry Sponsorship

Bridge Foundry Sponsorship

Since 2009,
Bridge Foundry has empowered people with technology through
teaching and facilitating access, enlarging the community of people who give back and teach others.
The Bridge Foundry mission totally aligns with our values.
We try to be good upstanding citizens of our online community: we want
to help our community to be inclusive and socially conscious. We do
that supporting our do-gooder friends, and
we decided to support Bridge Foundry as part of our Giving Back
efforts. In this page, you can read more about our collaboration and
discover what founders and CEO can do to increase diversity and
inclusivity in their software companies.

Life Is Too Short for Bad Software... Or Bad Teams.

The following content was contributed by our friends at
Bridge Foundry.

For ten years, Balsamiq has been making good design more inclusive by
providing an ideation tool with a low barrier to entry — and teaching
human interface design principles along the way. Over almost the same
time period,
Bridge Foundry has
been making the tech industry more diverse by teaching coding in an
inclusive learning environment — and modeling respectful work
practices along the way.

Both organizations have always recognized that there’s a lot more to
software development than writing code. Team practices and culture
have a significant impact on software quality and business success.
Our very different organizations have some common characteristics that
make for a great partnership. We believe in generosity and hold the
shared beliefs that small actions lead to big impact and in empowering
individuals.

Generosity is good business

As early as 2008, Balsamiq stated that they would strive to “be a
company that’s human, respectful, transparent, [and] inclusive” and
their mantras
include being servant leaders, being good citizens and being generous.
At the same time BridgeFoundry was growing out of initial workshops
where a
culture of abundance
created a new approach to learning to code. At those first workshops,
Balsamiq supported attendees with free licenses to help them continue
learning and designing software. Fast forward to 2017: Balsamiq’s
generous sponsorship enabled BridgeFoundry to establish its presence
as an independent nonprofit organization (with tax-exempt status in
the United States).

Balsamiq CEO, Peldi Guilizzoni describes the reasons for Balsamiq’s
software donation program as a moral
duty, a rewarding and inspiring experience for the team, and good for
business. This parallels how how Bridge Foundry programs work with
volunteers and companies.

Sarah Allen, founder and CEO of Bridge Foundry notes that “people
usually volunteer to teach because they want to help others, then
later they realize how much they learn.” Companies who sponsor
workshops and other programs genuinely want to improve the tech
industry, and also find that their involvement helps them connect to
diverse talent as well as improve their own software engineering
culture when their staff gets involved.

It’s all the “small” pieces

“Everything is a core product. That’s right. The software is just a
small piece of it. The documentation, so important. The tutorials, so
important.” -- Peldi

Balsamiq has a concept they call the Golden Puzzle — whenever someone
writes something good about the company publicly, especially when not
about its core competencies (product and support), they add them to a
collection. These are pieces of the puzzle of what makes Balsamiq a
great company.

Bridge Foundry has found that what makes an effective learning
environment is more than great teachers and hands-on technical
curriculum. A shared meal, supervised play care to give parents a
chance to focus, a post-workshop celebration -- these are all pieces
of the Bridge Foundry puzzle. The issues blocking more diverse
participation in the technology industry are rarely technical.

Empowerment

At the core of both organizations is the idea that by making better
tools available to more people, we get better software. Balsamiq’s
Wireframes product makes software design accessible to anyone in an
organization — individuals can quickly communicate ideas as UI
sketches. Bridge Foundry is increasing access to the tech industry not
only by making technology more accessible to underrepresented groups,
but also by making diverse talent and inclusive approaches more
accessible to a broader range of companies. Even a small company can
make a big difference through its own outreach programs. Diversity is
not only about hiring a diverse team. Bridge Foundry works with CEOs
and technical leaders on developing practices which include outreach
in all aspects of their programs — how they reach customers, engage in
open source and participate in conferences and developer community
eventsI

How to Increase Diversity in Small Software Businesses

In this video, Peldi interviews Sarah Allen about
inclusivity and diversity in software companies.
Sarah Allen is Bridge Foundry's founder. She has been working in the
software industry for almost 30 years, often being responsible for
recruiting and staffing teams. She is kind of a rock star for us!
Peldi asked her opinion about how to increase diversity, why is
worth doing, inclusivity beyond recruiting, how to handle possible
conflicts and more.
We believe that her suggestions are both inspiring and practical for
every founder and CEO in our industry (and not only).

Useful Links:

“The mere presence of diversity in a group creates
awkwardness, and the need to diffuse this tension leads to better
group problem solving”
says — Katherine Phillips, an associate professor of management and
organizations at the Kellogg School of Management. (Better decisions through diversity)

Joy Buolamwini describes
the coded gaze
about how algorithms can spread bias.

Video Transcription

00:00 Intro and Sarah Allen's Introduction

Peldi:
Alright! Hello everyone, this is Peldi from Balsamiq and today I am
joined by my old friend and former boss Sarah Allen and we're gonna be
talking about how CEOs of small software companies like me, or
hopefully you, can talk about diversity and increase the diversity of
their companies.
So let's do a quick little intro. Sarah, tell us a little bit about
yourself
Sarah:
My name is Sarah Allen and I've been working in the software industry
as for almost 30 years, which is quite a while, and I've been back and
forth between often being an individual contributor and being the
manager of a team and responsible for recruiting and staffing teams.
Early in my career, I was I I bought into the narrative that I was one
of a few women and quickly actually learned in the first few years
that there's a huge heritage of women in the software industry and in
fact, there was a time when it was dominated by women. So then I
realized that there was just this unseen mass of women in the field
and developed my own techniques for recruiting diverse teams.
In the 90s I defined diversity as gender diversity and then I became
aware that we have a bigger problem, at least in San Francisco, where
I have spent most of my career in the Bay Area, and I think this is
true in most of the United States, in racial diversity and cultural
diversity. In general, that we tend to have these pockets of very
homogeneous groups and so I've I ran my own software company which I
grew to be twenty people mostly developers and it was balanced by
gender. We had a mix of races a mix of sexual orientations and I'm
kind of more importantly a mix of people who came from different
backgrounds, small talk and C++ and Java and we were all learning
mobile development so... so that was really fun. So I think we need to
think about lots of different axes of diversity.
Peldi:
I remember when you were starting that company and how diversity and
having a balanced team was almost your primary goal, it was to give a
home to write to try and create this kind of environment to kind of
prove to the world that it was possible, it was doable. Remember?
Sarah:
Actually, I think that was definitely a goal, but my primary goal in
creating Blazing Cloud was to create a place where I was comfortable
working, where I was happy and productive and their demographic
attributes weren't a thing and we could all focus on being amazing
software developers.

03:15 - What Is Bridge Foundry

Peldi:
Awesome! Well, tell me a little bit about Bridge Foundry.
Sarah:
Bridge Foundry started as Rails Bridge in 2009 and we really started
to increase diversity in the Ruby community and in the tech community
at large and one of the projects of the original Rails Bridge
organization was these workshops where Sarah Mei and I decided that
for one year we were going to hold a workshop every month to outreach
to women, both current programmers and non-programmers and teach Ruby
on Rails. So we develop this format that quickly grew to many
different technologies and then in 2013, we renamed it Bridge Foundry
to honor all of the technologies that were involved. And now, this
past summer, thanks to some help from Balsamiq, we created an
independent 501 (c) (3) organization which is a US IRS certification
which is non-profit and really we are creating an organizational
structure to support this grassroots and movements. So, now we have
eight Bridges in, still doing Rails and Go, Clojure, Mobile, Scala,
Rust, Elixir, and Elm. Each of these bridges focuses on a different
technology. We have a way to start a bridge when somebody from that
tech community is passionate about creating diversity in that
community, wants to start a curriculum.
Peldi:
What kind of impact has it had?
Sarah:
It's pretty phenomenal. We very carefully tracked the impact in the
first six months in the San Francisco Ruby Meetup and we went from
having 2% women in that Ruby meet up to 18% in six months, which Sarah
Mei gave a great talk about it back in 2009. That really became the
model of realizing this thing, that felt like boiling the ocean,
really wasn't that hard and we developed a set of techniques and now
we really want to focus more on sharing those techniques more widely
and applying them beyond tech meetups and to the industry at large,
because that's what we're seeing those effects. One of the things that
I think is most interesting is that our focus initially was
skill-development for underserved communities and what we found was we
were having a tremendous impact on the companies that hosted the
workshops, where people who were expert software developers would come
and their framing of the world would change, simply by participating
in this one-day workshop. When we started, men, particularly white men
or men in general, from the local Ruby community who worked, you know,
in the software company, would meet more technical women in one
weekend than they'd met in their whole lives. The narrative in 2009
was there are no women and we really shifted that narrative and then
the next year in 2010 there was a tremendous narrative about, you
know, where we started to see these spotlights.
Peldi:
That's amazing. Now, do you think you were more successful in
recruiting women to these events because of the way you framed them
or... How how did you make it look so easy? Because what I hear is
that everybody says there are no women and I can't find any women...
but it's not true.
Sarah:
So well, I think that we served an unmet need right? In 2009 the
expectation was that you had to somehow become a software developer
before you could get into the software development field and there was
also quite a bit of bias towards people who'd stayed in the same job
for ten years. If you were a Java developer who worked at a bank and
had been doing that for a long time, people questioned: "Could you
really learn Ruby?". At that time, Ruby was perceived to be a language
that was used by expert software developers, not by novices, and that
it had sophisticated constructs that could not be easily learned by
novices. We have a lot of new languages where that same narrative is
reemerging and so what we did was we just helped with having rails.
So, Rails had an easy onboarding and it was a great way to get started
in Ruby. We provided evidence. I was surprised. I did not expect that
people who were new to software development would be able to really
get into the fields simply by these workshops. The workshops are
really just an introduction, so what we saw was it was tapping into
the community that is very difficult when you're a minority
demographic, because of the social network of understanding what the
job is and having the connections to people, who can tell you like
where the good jobs are and there's so many different kinds of
software that you really have to know a lot of people in software
development to find the niche that you want to work in.
Peldi:
Right, so the workshops are a bit of an on-ramp, a bit of a first step
that is that is often just what's needed but it reduces the big giant
barrier to entry, right? It's a step to people who are new, but it
also allows people who are super senior to see that... hey look this
is there are all these people that want to join or... this is totally
doable. It makes them realize that there are steps that can be taken,
you don't just have to show up as an expert from zero. Right?
Sarah:
Yeah I think it also illustrates that there is a missing narrative and
how men are quote self-taught that they often when you dig into it
it's like: "Well um my friend was you know a really good Python
developer and inspired me to learn and then I asked him questions" but
it's presented as I just taught myself on my own, but usually there's
a social network that supports that, that women have less access to.
Peldi:
Even creating, starting to create that network... I thought it was
interesting when you were listing all the Bridges how a lot of them
are sort of newish languages, more kind of you know... you didn't say
JavaScript you didn't say you know C++, because is this a conscious
choice on bridge boundaries part so that you guys can influence
smaller younger communities earlier well?
Sarah:
I think it is it's reflective of a model. If somebody wanted to create
a C++ Bridge we would embrace that, I think that I remember when I was
doing C and C++ I never considered that there was a C community right?
It wasn't a thing then. With the newer languages, things that have
been emerging in the last ten years, you actually have a community of
people working typically an open source who are sharing more actively.
I think the rise of the web and social networking has facilitated
that. But the other thing is when we started I had done a lot of
research about the percentage of women in tech and I knew that at the
time statistically there were 25 to 30% of people who did software
development were women. I think at the time it was like less than five
or 10% of developers were Ruby developers, it might have been even 1
or 2 %, I don't know, it was a very small percentage. So I did that
math and I thought... well there are more women developers in San
Francisco than there are Ruby developers and that statistic made me
suddenly realize that we could get to 50 % easy just by expanding the
set of people who are interested in Ruby! So, we set a metric where
our goal was to train 10 to 20 women a month in Ruby, some of them
experienced developers some of them novice developers and then if just
10% of them would stick around, we would triple the number of women
who went to this conference where Sarah and I met and dreamed up this
idea. So, by having these metrics and not assuming that like it's a
great success if 10% of the people you teach are interested and
continue and determining your success metrics, understanding that
you're gonna have to do a tremendous amount of outreach because there
are some people just aren't into it that... it's cool, some people are
like "no I really like Java" whatever...

13:02 - Why Should We Spend an Effort on Having a Diverse Team?

Peldi:
Okay awesome, interesting. All right, so let's get to the classic
questions that I get, that I hear other CEOs have, and I have to admit
that before and myself. First is this: there is more and more
literature about this but I'd like to get your take on
why is it even important, why should we spend an effort on having a
diverse team .
Sarah:
So, I really feel that where.. in my experiences, when you create an
environment where a diverse team can thrive, that is the best software
development environment. I really like the research. I did a little
looking up reminding myself of the research last night and I really
liked
some work written by Katherine Phillips
who's at the Kellogg School of Managementand she really dug into like
what's the cause and effect here right, because it could just be
correlated or there's been a lot of business research that more
diverse teams lead to better business outcomes, but maybe better
businesses can invest more in creating diverse teams. But actually she
reports that the mere presence of diversity in a group creates
awkwardness and the need to defuse this tension leads to better group
problem solving and I think that ties back to my assertion that
diverse teams are just more fun. It is more fun if there can be like a
little bit of a hiccup now and then like... "what? you said that? oh
really?" and there has to be an environment of forgiveness of failure
and that needs to be not just like "oh I came up with this idea that
that's totally not gonna work" and my bias my background my thought
process leading up to this led to it being just not right and I can
just put those things out there and be corrected. Correspondingly, if
I say something that you feel is exclusionary like if you feel that's
alienating, if you feel it's racist if you feel it's sexist that you
can just tell me because you know that like I totally did not mean it
and my intention is to create a collaborative environment and I'm
gonna take that feedback and learn from it and you're not gonna have
negative repercussions for having called me out and those are the
environments we need to create because that's how we create, how
that's how we generate the best ideas and that's how we need to
collaborate to create great software.
Sarah:
So the other I also want to mention, like sort of the other aspect of
this which has been in the press recently around machine learning a
lot which is that we're creating biased algorithms at scale and having
a diverse team is a shortcut like it's not a panacea because you can
definitely have you know yeah I can have like I have all the skin
tones but I still don't have diversity in some way and you certainly
don't want to make somebody responsible for speaking for or
representing their whole race or gender like, that's just wacky, but
it does just bring in more influences. I was recently reading about
Joy, I don't know if I'm pronouncing her name right, Buolamwini,
weenies talks
about the coded gaze about how algorithms can spread bias, how they
encode bias and she's created the algorithm Justice League and I
wasn't even aware, apparently a lot of black folks are aware that like
soap dispensers often don't work with black skin
just our skin toes which is just crazy you can imagine like obviously
no one on the team is black, right, but they didn't find this in
testing like there are so many layers... You know you see these
machine learning data sets, which are all white faces, and these lead
to just really terrible, terrible outcomes and I'm so disturbed by
this pattern that has been happening for like... I saw the first note
of it that I found in the press was 2010 and it's now 2019 and we're
still seeing these patterns in these common libraries that just create
these so-called bugs over and over again but can you really call it a
bug if it's been over eight years.
Peldi:
If no one thought about it...
Sarah:
Well, clearly they have, like... these things are bugs have been
reported and not because I think there are different layers of it
right... there's the knowledge of it, and then there's the action of
it.
Peldi:
Awesome awesome. Not to get political, maybe we'll edit this part out,
but when you were talking about how having a diverse team makes the
conversation better, I am very much thinking about how I admire the
French election system where they have two rounds and the first round
is purely proportional so there's maybe 20 30 different parties each
caring very deeply about their specific you know, ideology or whatever
program and so in, the first round you vote with your heart for what
you love and what you care about and then only the top two to go to
the second round so in the second round you kind of pinch your nose a
little bit and then vote for the least worst and then you have a
stable majority sort of system like in the US we're not like Italy
where they change government every 12 month... two months but at least
I like the proportional system because if you're in a group of ten
people you will know that you have to sort of being careful what you
say, because you don't know what they, you know, who they vote for or
whatever, as opposed to the US where it's you're with us or you're
against us it's two parties completely divided they hate each other's
guts and then at the end that's you become so homogeneous that you
can't... it's sort of echo chamber, your quality of conversation and
output I think suffers tremendously from that.
Sarah:
We're seeing this polarization right so, you know in the US all over
the world and we're seeing it culturally in industry right, not only
the tech industry but everywhere and so where there's this perception
that we're just two groups you know. Diversity is women/men, or
diversity as black people and white people or like immigrants and
citizens or you know it... It's not it doesn't create for healthy
debate and it doesn't create for this innovation idea so I do think
there's a parallel and I think that leaders, CEOs need to watch out
for where these things that are just tendencies become encoded in the
system and that's what you're talking about is we can create systems
that actually encode more for diversity by thinking about how we make
decisions, right, and how we hear those minority voices.

20:52 - Diversity in Recruiting

Peldi:
So let's take it down to the practical level. For instance,
recruiting, right? Referral programs.. right? Fantastic you save a
bunch of money because your friend, your employees refer their friends
and it's quick and they're pre-vetted right but..they all look the
same yet? Sarah:
Yeah! So, that is that's pretty challenging. The easiest way to
address that, which is maybe a lot of the audience listening, would be
with is well past this, but if you're an entrepreneur you are you
know, there are three people on your team right now that is the moment
where you can have the biggest impact because diversifying when you're
small is easier. The key thing is to make sure that before you make a
hiring decision you have interviewed at least one or two people who
don't look like you or what around whatever metric you think is
valuable right, talk to somebody who you would if you academically
like put up ten attributes that you think don't really have to do with
expertise, experience... Yeah, maybe you think, as I used to, that
it's harder to become a good software developer if you didn't get a CS
degree, so you're you know that you're biased against that but you
know you're like... well the prob maybe I believe that it's
possible... wait, put that down right like race, gender, you know,
sexual orientation all the things and then you know make a list and
say like... do I know anyone who would be qualified? Have I heard of
anyone who'd be qualified? And, make a list of all those people and
make sure you talk to some of them. So, what I find is people are
making hiring decisions out of a homogeneous pool and it takes some
creativity to just put yourself out there and reach out to somebody
you don't know to create a wider pool and I think that you need to
play the long game with hiring for that right if you're in. I could
talk to a lot of founders who are in the situation over there like
"oops just thought about this and I have 12 people who all are the
same" and that's a problem and what do I do we all just know other
people have just looked like us and went to the same school we started
"hey we started right out of college so we were a bunch of people who
lived the same college we live in the same area and all about first
hires are easy because they're all in our social network and now we
don't have a diverse network" because we all come the same place. So,
there are so many ways to bring diversity into your culture: you can
invite people to come to get talks, you can go give talks together you
can sponsor things. There are ways to sponsor that are no money
sponsorships, right if you are running a software company you have
some kind of wealth right it's IP wealth, it's you know maybe you have
some space, maybe you have connections to up to maybe your customers
have space. There are things that you have access to, that other
people don't, and the more that you are willing to share that with
underserved communities in whatever way you can imagine... that's you
know that's priceless. Peldi:
So, one thing about that you told me a long time ago which I thought
was I was brilliant was: "if you think about diversity when it's time
to hire someone new, it's too late it's almost too late". Sarah:
Yeah it's very hard, because then you're in the current hiring crunch
and you have to decide between spending the more time on outreach
versus just hiring somebody because you need them and you need to make
software and you know you keep that payroll to meet, and you've got
like all sorts of things or you know deadlines or whatever... But, I
was in this situation a couple of times and basically, there's a
couple of rules I follow. One is writing a great job description and
you know vetted by a few people who don't aren't like you in some way
and post it publicly. That allows your social network to reach their
social network right? If you're just talking to people you know and
you're just talking about the opportunity they can't share it, so get
it out publicly ASAP first Peldi:
Make it easy to share... Sarah:
Exactly and then, when you're going through your recruiting, you do
this thing where you know it's like the Rooney rule from football
where you find somebody to interview right. I when I was running a
very small company and when you know back when I was at MacroMedia I
always had the guideline that I wanted to have a difficult decision
when I was hiring. My goal was to make it be like "oh I have so many
good candidates I can't pick. I might have to go to my... you know
when I was at a bigger company I might have to go to find ?? and make
a case for two because they're both so awesome". That's the situation
you want to be in, and if you are in a situation where you have one
stand out candidate, you need to keep looking and you will know like
you should be interviewing a bunch of people at once right and you'll
know if you've got one person who's over top.
Peldi:
That's counterintuitive and awesome where you think you found the one
if it's just one you're not done yet... Sarah:
Exactly and usually it takes a couple weeks to close so... that's the
time where I've to keep looking because the other thing is like that
person may take a different job and then you need to have the rest of
your candidates so that you're in a strong position you know because
like stuff happens. It's competitive.

27:23 - Diversity in the Day-to-Day of the Company

Peldi:
So what is a way to bring diversity, even if it's not about
recruiting, into the day-to-day of the company? Sarah:
So I'd love to have an atmosphere of Tech Talks where you invite
people in virtually or in person to share with the team, like other
industry leaders who work on technology that's nearby you. I usually
keep an eye at conferences that are in my region and if I see a
speaker who I think is amazing I'll invite them to speak and they
might not have time but creating that connection, showing an interest
in somebody based on their technical expertise is an incredible
opportunity for any business leader. I mean not just technical of
course, it could be other expertise whatever domain you're in and when
you're picking people to come to speak to your team really think
about: "Am I picking somebody who I just saw on Twitter or am I really
looking for the expert here?" And so for a while, when I was kind of
becoming aware that that race that diversity was more than gender I
realized that I had filled my network with amazing technical women but
most of them were white and a few of them were Asian and I realized
that like you know 10 years ago I was like okay... yeah yeah there's
maybe that one black engineer I know and it was embarrassing, it was
you know horrifying to realize like that this was this huge blind spot
that I had to say "well like my assumption is that.." you know that
and you have to become comfortable talking to about this, which it's
like it's just a negative signal right. When you first become aware of
what you need to be aware that you are in a dark room, looking for
people with a flashlight and you have what you've become aware of is
your flashlight is pointed in one place on the floor and you're not
moving it around. So, I think the first step is to move it around like
to be like... okay so for a while whenever I would send a paper out to
my team, or a video I would just do it like a Google search and it's
very time-consuming to try to find the race and gender of the person
who wrote the paper and it's sort of a weird exercise because it feels
kind of awkward, because you don't want to be filtering on that, but
at the same time it caused me I would read three or four or five
papers before for sending one out. It would cause me to just to look
more and then what I would find is the first thing I read maybe it was
somebody just like often it would be like a video, right a TED talk
,something and then I would be like oh that person's just parroting
this research that now these five other people are parroting and oh
this up they you know this third person actually does a better job of
it that I was not my first hit or I can actually find the original
researcher and like just that extra digging and then you know just
sort of accidentally on purpose happen to have a diverse set of
speakers amongst the visible attributes. Peldi:
I've started doing that and I think that that's very actually very
simple to do. When you're about to share a link that you found on
Twitter see who shared it right and see who the original author is and
try to find the original author or try to find someone who can explain
it well, who maybe it doesn't look like you all. I really like your
idea going a little step back about finding speakers to come to you
because I think that serves twofold, one it opens your team's minds to
make it normal that it's not just white guys who give the talks, it
becomes normal and so I think it is sort of even just that is I think
it's a big step to sort of change the frame of mind, but also by sort
of networking with these experts it's a step into a community that you
might not have easy access to, but it's a community that looks up to
them already right so, it's a great way in and you're gonna make a new
friend and you know... expand your own horizons and all that. Sarah:
I also think that it may be I don't know if you can maybe even tell me
like, whether like white men are generally aware that there's this
like pretty well Pradhan Whisperer Network right there's a lot of
women and underrepresented minorities don't necessarily know either,
but most of the senior technical women that I know and folks who are
from other traditionally marginalized demographics will check up on
companies before they accept a job, because especially if you get
further in your career you become very painfully aware that if you
spend two years reporting to somebody who is biased against you... it
doesn't have to be like sexual harassment it doesn't have to actually
be anything that you could report to, you know, the Equal Opportunity
Commission it's just that they aren't they don't see in you your
potential and then you know losing two years in this industry it's a
huge setback and so people will check up on you and if they're you
want to have the connections in the network you want to have evidence
out there that it's that you have you might have you know 10 or 20
white dudes who work for you but that's not a signal that it is a
racist organization or a sexist organization but in some cases it is
right? One of the things that's really hard I think for these
homogeneous teams is, what I found, is that you can have sexist and
racists hiding there right. Somebody might treat me really really well
and they're gonna treat a black engineer really poorly or a Latino
engineer really poorly and I won't see that until that person shows up
and then it's a horrible situation to put somebody into, you don't
want to invite somebody onto your team and then unbeknownst to you one
of your colleagues who seems to be awesome actually has some behaviors
that need to be corrected. Peldi:
So back to how a white man CEO like me can expand the network, right?
Other than going to conferences, meeting other speakers you know...
I've googled all kinds of "black girls who code" you know all
sorts of communities try to find several communities. I admit it I was
doing it too late, I was doing it to try and pitch this job opening.
That's the wrong time and in fact that I fail most cases. In some
cases, I found some Slack groups that said: "Sorry, we're not gonna
let you in, this is our space" and I totally respect that right but in
some cases, some groups are hard to reach, at least for a newbie. What
do you suggest? How can we break the ice? You've mentioned sponsoring
things... that's a simple thing to do for instance. Sarah:
That's one of the things that makes the Bridge work format unique is
that we specifically welcome anyone who is who really wants to help
and it's going to show up and follow the Code of Conduct and our code
of conduct is a little different from others. There's more of these
that are broader and setting really high standards of behavior. When
Code of Conduct first shot up started showing up in open source
communities and conference they were typically not much more than
anti-harassment policies, where our Code of Conduct says actually
you're supposed to create a safe and respectable working environment,
learning environment, and you're here to teach a workshop and so you
can't ask anyone on a date. That's like just putting it out there like
you have to say these things! So a lot of what we've done is
created... some of our teacher training has evolved from at first it
was just teaching the curriculum and now it's teaching
How do you correct when you see these things in action? So, I
think that if you've already got a sizeable team getting people to
show up at these where help is needed then interaction with diverse
groups where there is some kind of support for well-meaning people who
might not realize that something they say is gonna land awkwardly and
make somebody feel alienated. Those things are... if you've grown up
in a homogeneous group, if you watch the media, you know it's you
can't help but be influenced in and say things that are just like so
inconsiderate, but you don't know it and you know I'm very thankful
for the people who have befriended me early in my awareness of these
things who are willing to say look, Sarah, that thing you said... I
think that you need to have ideally you but like also folks on your
team who will show up and start to realize that there is a change in
the interaction that is necessary. You can't just add somebody into
your team and have it be all on that.

38:42 - Internal Policies: Culture and Codification

Peldi:
That would be unfair...for sure speaking of the Code of Conduct, what
do you think a CEO like me should do about internal policies? How much
is culture, how much needs to be codified? Sarah:
I think it helps to codify some of your culture, like to think about
like you know what are the things that really make this company
awesome what are the things that I just expect from everyone and try
to write them down because new folks won't necessarily know and if
they experience a poor interaction they don't know like "oh maybe this
is what I need to expect here" and you won't know it as soon as your
team grows like I remember there's been some work on looking at code
reviews and this like who gets code reviews and has been talking to
open-source about it being a false meritocracy because the truth is
like your contribution gets accepted based on the people who already
are in the in-crowd right and they think they're being well reasoned
mostly I think, it's just that if they know somebody then they're like
"oh he was just being careless", if they don't know somebody they're
like "oh they're sloppy". And the difference between like that person
just isn't done yet and this other person is being sloppy it could be
the exact same thing. You might think about things like if you have a
code review culture like our expectation is that you respond to a code
review in 24 hours or let the person know that they should find
somebody else to do a code review and because I've heard tales of
women who are like "Yeah I started this job and you know I just
thought that it's normal to it take a few weeks to get feedback",
because like I'm new and so my contribution is less important than
others and they don't realize that is not okay and so they don't speak
up right how would you know... and so I think just you know every once
in a while just reflect on what are the things that you expect from
your colleagues and write them down. Peldi:
What about more explicit things like quotas? That's a controversial
topic, right? Sarah:
I recently attended Lesbians Who Tech in San Francisco and it was it's
was just so fun in a great environment and I felt welcomed as you know
I'm married to a man and I have a kid I'm like I feel like I'm like
the conservative profile in San Francisco and Lianne Pittsford who
started Lesbians Who Tech said that she set a quota, 50% this 25%
that, and then did outreach to meet it. I think that's simpler in a
way it when you're looking at the audience, but it still can be
controversial like oh well you know like I'm kind of sell tickets you
know I'm worried about having enough and what I tend to set is is
metrics for Am I successfully recruiting? metrics for like
what are my goals how would I like this to be and generally I think
being aware of what are the demographics in your region like you
should know them, and you want your group to reflect the demographics
in your region or the demographics of your customers. Or you think
about like well actually I think that you could also think that like
oh I think that this gender disparity and racial disparity is probably
gonna get fixed in the next 10 years, at least I hope it will be, so
if I have more representation internally I'm gonna have a competitive
edge. Think about it in terms of connecting it to your business and
setting yourself like goals for how you're going to get this awesome
talent that is out there. Peldi:
There's a lot of people when they say we gotta fix this diversity
issue, they run and do an unconscious bias training and then think
they're done. What are some training programs? Are training programs
useful? What our demography useful? What to do first and second?
Sarah:
That's a great question. I think self-motivated unconscious bias
training is great like I've been through it and I was like "oh
interesting I knew most of this research but I learned a couple
things" but even I understand is unconscious bias training it's like
putting your name at the top of the paper, it's not writing the essay.
You just started. You got the piece of paper out yay! ...ready to
start the essay! So, Bridge Foundry is developing some training that
we have this idea to apply what we've been doing with volunteers to
corporate training so anybody's interested in that... reach out! And
we're actually planning to do a research project about that, which I'm
very excited about, but basically, I would focus on conflict
resolution training. How does your team resolve conflicts, and how do
you create that space for people to correct each other and how do you
do onboarding? If you fix your onboarding process and if you create a
self-healing system or anybody who runs into a roadblock is supposed
to unblock it for the next person, that is the kind of thing that will
over time fix the problems within your company. It's coming back to
this systemic bias thing. You need to create like systemic bias
towards awesomeness and everyone needs to be a part of that, managers
have more responsibility however if everyone isn't involved if
everybody doesn't feel empowered to have agency it won't get fixed. I
think that centering this work around what's going to make my team
thrive? How do I create a learning environment where people can take
risks? And do things and we're working as a team is high value. I read
about
Amy Edmondson's work on psychological safety
be based on actually
some research Google did about the effectiveness of teams, and she had this hypothesis that about high psychological safety
reducing the number of errors and her initial research yielded that
there were actually more errors in teams that appeared to be
psychologically safer, and luckily she was able to get some more
funding and dive back into that, and what she found is there are more
errors reported of course that make sense! You've just got to be
careful of the metrics you choose right, this is like around the quota
so you dirt certainly don't want someone to feel that they were hired
because of their demographics and so you want to like figure out what
is your awesomeness and be careful about how you select for that,
because there are probably some things that are awesome about your
culture that are unspoken and it's hard to surface them. But, if you
can create a culture where people can report things Freada Kapor Klein
who's one of my mentors in this work talk to me about when she worked
in the early days of Lotus in the I guess the 80s with Mitch Kapor who
founded Lotus and he was a CEO and she ran HR and they had I way that
employees could report things that were with anonymously and then they
would actually take action on those and report back to the whole
company. And, they would work on fixes for these anonymous reports and
then announcing them publicly. So, figuring out like what are the
systems and you can implement these systems much easier when your
company's little and engage your team and brainstorming these things
like have a have a brainstorm. I used to think these culture things
were like super fluffy and like a waste of time but my Danae
Ringelmann founder of IndieGoGo, Danae gave this talk about culture a
while ago where she said people think culture is very soft but
actually it's very hard. Because culture is also the easiest way to
get stuff to happen. I have another technique but I'll come back to
it, cause I forgot it.

49:29 - Reporting Problems With the Ceo and Hiring an Hr Company

Peldi:
Okay, let's talk about the worst-case scenario. Your five-person
company, ten-person company there's no HR right... and you might be
that way for ten years. I'm sure small companies have a way to report
problems to the CEO, what happens if the problem is with the CEO?
Sarah:
Yeah so that is tough when I ran Blazing Cloud we had a like a
contract HR company and we worked with a small company which I think
was very effective because then there was like a person that was we're
also responsible for it's nice to have this because they'll onboard
the person and make sure all the forms are filled out because in our
first year we were not as good as we should have been and then when
they leave like there's like laws about how quickly you pay off
vacation time and like all sorts of things and so having somebody
who's gonna do that work is like hugely I would recommend that! But
it's like HR at its all the HR laws right they know that and the
employment laws and but then that's somebody who the employee knows
and you communicate to them that they are a kennel. Peldi:
A safe channel that is independent, 'cause it's outside the company,
doesn't report to the CEO... Sarah:
Well, I'm glad you raised that because they do report to the CEO.
Peldi:
'cause HR as a consultant... Sarah:
HR is really working for the company making sure that the company
doesn't break laws. There's another type of program that is hard for
small companies but there's a new company called
tEQuitable which is starting
a kind of hosted Ombudsman program. Peldi:
Tell us about it. Sarah:
So this is really a safe space and so it's a way that a somebody can
just like a lot of these a lot of things that happen when you think
like, oh well maybe this is race or gender bias or some kind of bias
or maybe it's just a weird thing that happened and it's very hard to
bring it up to HR because that tends to start like this whole
investigation thing and it can be time-consuming and then you know and
then you're like it creates a lot of anxiety for a person because it
gets into that legal space but like getting back to the code of
conduct right like we you need this huge space between what is
acceptable behavior and what is illegal. There should be an
ginenormous space there so that people have room to kind of mess up
and get corrected. This Ombudsman program creates a way for an
employee to go talk to the person and if there's something really like
call the police-illegal they won't keep a confidential and
they're very upfront about that but if it's just like.. I want to
advise this weird thing happened you know what should I do they will
feel that and then typically they'll also track patterns so they're
like oh well this particular subgroup keeps having this kind of things
and be able to recommend to the organization changes and programs and
trainings and different things so I'm really excited about the idea
that this could be a hosted program so that you know so that small
companies might be able to engage more. Peldi:
We'll definitely look into that oh by the way we're gonna put all the
links for all these wonderful resources down below, like this the
Youtubers say...

53:28 - Recruiting: Use Your Unique Awesomeness

Sarah:
I remembered something. In recruiting you to want to figure out what
is your absolutely unique awesomeness, what is the thing that you
might find somebody who is just super excited about that thing like
Balsamiq "life's too short for bad software". I love that catchphrase
because it embodies what you're trying to achieve and people could
just be so excited about improving interaction design and then you can
attract them better than any other company because you do that thing
so well and that's what you want to amplify and I think that's one of
the most exciting things about the internet like I remember when I was
first doing web stuff in the mid-90s and I was just amazed how like
any topic and the web is smaller then, but still like it'd be like you
know model trains made cheese-like there's a thousand people doing
that you would never have known it. I remember a couple of years ago I
was working on a little project with my son who was then in high
school and I was like we need a placeholder image and he was like how
about ferret hats and I was like... ferret hats? and I looked it up on
the internet and there were thousands better it happen and it wasn't
just like a meme it was like there's stores where you can buy hats for
your ferrets and I was like wow I never knew that ferret hats were a
thing and he said everything's a thing. mom! So you have to figure out
what your thing is your thing that is like of interest to less than
10,000 people less than 1,000 engineers and then find those engineers
and though you will be like a magnet to those engineers once they know
who you are, and even if they don't want to work for you they're the
people who should be in your community, they should be your advisors
they should be like so I think that is like the best recruiting
technique because then also like you're going after somebody for
something they're like crazy nutty about.
Peldi:
They're gonna do the evangelists into their communities.
Sarah:
And if you reach out to something somebody on the topic of their
expertise and they're not world famous like they're just you know the
most famous ferret hat maker like they'll probably be thrilled for.

56:13 - How a Ceo Should Discuss the Sexual Harassment Theme WithTheir
Team?

Peldi:
So what about the recent news the opening of the lid of the sexual
harassment in the news. First of all, how should how should we discuss
it and then you know it's awkward there's that SNL skit where they try
to talk about it and everybody's like "Oh careful" But anyways, you
know and that was within friends, what about inside the company? Do
you have any tips on how our CEO should discuss this with their team?
Sarah:
This is this is really hard right there's no easy answer to this.
That's correct. Silence is probably not a good option, but you also
need to be aware that these are also triggered topics right? they if
somebody's been personally affected or have a friend or family members
been personally affected which is statistically at least I think in
the US like 25% of women have been raped like it's really widespread
and you know and there's a lot of these you know kind of #metoo
actions that are not classified as rape they're just completely
inappropriate behavior that you know sets people back in their
careers. Be aware right that when you bring these things up they're
gonna land differently with people and it's it's very treacherous
territory because you might have some individuals who have never been
exposed to this and they are newly aware they might think it's not
widespread right, and then you have other people who are like yeah
like there was another SNL skit when a lot of this broke that was like
a music video called
Welcome to hell
and it's been like this why don't you speak up before and why didn't
you listen before...I mean Why didn't you listen before? I mean in
some ways it's you know I have to say that I tell myself it is great
that we collectively can speak up and it's and without there being the
possibility of it not ruining your life and career. But people are
taking those risks.
Peldi:
It seems like the the answer is the same as what you said before which
is, train your team on having difficult conversations, making that
less difficult you know in conflict resolution and listening to
everybody's opinion and being mindful that other people might come
from a different place or that it might be a very very painful subject
for them, you know teach people how to be respectful and not afraid to
go deep either when it's needed and, so that helps any conversation
but it also makes it for a more welcoming environment for a diverse
team.
Sarah:
I would encourage people, if you haven't done anything on this topic,
sometime in the next few months or you know this year, find a
facilitator who's doesn't work at your company and have a facilitated
conversation that's open, that asks the question what if this happened
here, what would we do, what would you want to have done how would you
want this to be respectfully through your colleagues and ask tough
questions like what if you had this experience from a customer? When I
was running Blazing Cloud we had a client who one of their employees
was like really inappropriate and one of my employees wasn't sure
whether she had to accept that behavior from the client and I had I
was like... "oh my gosh I can't believe that even crossed your mind",
but I had never set out expectations for how our customers treat us
and that you know that kind of thing is a bit of a blind spot and
people get in these situations where they're like oh I'm not gonna
close a sale unless I put up with this behavior and so it's not only
you know how I feel about it personally but am I going to risk my
company's business and as a CEO as a leaders we just have to say "No I
like no businesses. My employees are valuable and I'm setting the
standard of behavior we have plenty of customers are going to treat us
well and this is an important thing for our integrity" but knowing and
it takes some creativity and discussion in order to come up with those
things and your folks won't know that of you, they built hope that,
right but if there's any ambiguity that silence is reporting and you
want to know if this stuff is happening, within your team or in
interactions with your when your team has with the rest of the world
and they want to be able to lean on that and to whatever extent you
can make public statements. Our company expects this our company has
these values. It makes it easier for your employees to say that if
they're in a situation where they're like "Oh our company does this"
right they can just point to that they don't have to escalate it have
a discussion with you schedule a meeting and then it's two weeks later
and it's much harder to untangle it.

1:02:24 - How to Write a Code of Conduct

Peldi:
Now you mentioned that it's a great way to come up with these sort of
statements, code of conducts, policies is to do it with the team. What
if we want to make it easy for people? We could hire a facilitator
right or a lot of people you know it's like writing terms of service,
a lot of people just copy/paste from someone is really good at it.
Sarah:
Facilitator is very important if you're going if you're a white man,
like you are and you're going to talk about sexual harassment it does
happen you know across genders but I think also you're in the power
position so if you're the CEO it is best that you not facilitate that
particular conversation and it's also best that you don't ask the
woman on your staff to precipitance that's why that particular like
how would we handle sexual harassment like I think should be
facilitated. The culture the policy stuff we did this when I was
working at 18F Sasha Magee and I came up with this we were trying to
come up with our values, like a statement of our values it was very it
was like every six months would be like okay we gotta like state our
values we feel like we have shared values but we don't have like a
good press statement of it. We tried a bunch of different things and
what we landed on that worked really well was for people to like what
you know sort of a sticky note brainstorm where each person would come
up with what are the behaviors that I feel are reflective of our
values, and then aggregate them into groups and pull the values out of
those behaviors like what that allowed us to do it actually came out
of like, our amazing content strategists we're going to wordsmith the
values and then we could think... "they were like but what do you
really mean by transparency?" and then we're like I know we all voted
on that and we all think transparency is good. Then, here's like 17
attributes that are what we mean by transparency then they can create
like great content around that and then everybody knows what it means.
Peldi:
It is also easier to think about it, rather than these abstract
concepts...
Sarah:
Those are typically also in the like what do you want to do more of? I
think that that's a that's a really fun exercise then I think you can
just you can do with your own team and then you also learn things
right and the input you value and great information sharing.
Peldi:
Excellent. Is there something you wish I would have asked you that I
didn't? I have huge blind spots so 😊
Sarah:
I think that one thing that... I want to talk a little bit more about
open source because I was mentioning before how open source can be
really challenging in terms of the power dynamics. It can also be a
great opportunity to interact with community and so if you let your
engineers do open source in their day job, then they have an
opportunity to engage with colleagues across the industry who are
interested in that area of technology, they also have something they
can talk about at conferences and you can have a Code of Conduct in
your open source repository that they can show people what you want to
do there and I think it's another way of doing outreach, it's another
way you know you're giving back and you can do it in a small way we'd
like a little JavaScript library or like different things and even in
the littlest things are sometimes the most powerful because they can
be used across lots of different types of organizations and you're
sort of leaning into the tech. I think that we need to somehow try to
reclaim open-source maybe reclaim is the wrong verb maybe it just
claim it to be a place where we could have safe spaces that are
creative and collaborative and diverse and interesting and where
people can expect to be treated well. I think that that's something
that is it takes a little creativity to you know to figure out what
are the right things where this is okay. Then the other thing that I
do is I always have a policy that engineers when it when I was running
Blazing Cloud and we didn't have much money I would say that if you if
you speak at a conference peak at a conference then I will pay your
ticket and that was like a big thing but then then later I would let
people go to one conference a year as long as they did a trip report
but getting your folks out there in the community I think is the
biggest thing you can do for recruiting in general.

1:08:03 - Ways to expand your network... to recap:

Peldi:
So ways to expand your network... to recap:

reach out to speakers

go speak

make your staff speakers

contribute to open source

sponsor communities and events

volunteer for events where they need help

Am I forgetting anything?
Sarah:

create policies

create systemic equity instead of systemic bias

Peldi:

look for different sources before sharing links

have workshops internally to discuss these things this is super
actionable... this is exactly what I was hoping Sarah!

Sarah:

and diversify people you follow on Twitter if you're a Twitter
flavor, and then after a while, it becomes like a normal thing that
you just have diverse voices and then you and then it becomes weird
than other people don't and it's really exciting when you tip when
you turn the corner.

Peldi:
I like that on YouTube I subscribe to a lot of YouTubers and most of
the science YouTubers that I subscribe are women and once in a while I
come across this guy I was like oh yeah no it's the other way around.
Sarah:
So the other thing you can do is you can be intentional about the
faces that are out there talking about your work. A company like
Balsamiq could have you know could have a specific like we're looking
for X right like there's Summer of Code right which it which
specifically has like we will pay you to do open source and you know
and some of them are specifically targeted at women or specific
demographics. You could do some kind of a contest right which has a
prize and then you know or there's lots of different frameworks for it
but if you're doing something that sort of that's a scholarship or a
give back or something then you can target it in a particular
demographic and then you have the opportunity to highlight amazing
talent that you wouldn't have discovered because they come to you. So,
you can think about that and also sometimes if you're put it you know
if you get to the point where you're putting on a conference right
having diversity scholarships I think is a really great thing.
Peldi:
One thing that I do is when I get invited to speak at a conference I
look at the other speakers and if they all look like me I say no
unless there're changes.
Sarah:
Oh I think that's great, like also you know getting to know all these
other speakers fine, like you should always there say um there's a
movement called I think it's
The #One4One game
I'll have to look up the name of it but basically you challenge
yourself to find somebody who has your same skills and has a different
trait right if you're an able-bodied somebody who has disability, if
you're a woman well maybe you find somebody less represented right, if
your white person you find a black person or a Latino or in a Muslim
or whatever and then so you develop a set of these people who are
you but from a different demographic and then if there's no
if that demographic isn't represented then you're like here's a set of
both who I think you should invite and that's a service community,
like just amplifying voices who you think are amazing and because the
biases exist in the world they're not being known and if you're ever
interviewed by the media be careful because many reporters will only
ask the men questions or only ask like whoever they perceived to be
dominant based on their own inherent biases, and I've just seen lots
of articles about a tech team where only the men are quoted and
sometimes I'll actually know the team and I'll know that the men are
and made less contribution sometimes they're the leader, sometimes
they're not, but the point is that imbalance in media coverage also
sort of exacerbates this problem.
Peldi:
Interesting! All right, Sarah, I think it has been over an hour,
that's plenty for today. We have about six months of homework to do,
just based on this hour but I wanted to thank you very much and I'm
sure this was helpful and I will try to give people a way to reach you
or follow you know somehow learn from you, again in the description.
Sarah:
Well thank you for being open and interested in asking these questions
and this is it's really great to talk to somebody who is willing to
admit that there's a lot to learn here, cuz there it is I mean I still
learn stuff every day.
Peldi:
It's interesting that we've had this call planned for a year maybe and
then all this stuff blew up and now all of a sudden it's the news, but
I've been meaning to learn about the stuff for a long time. All right,
bye everybody!